Canada Post is back!

A big sigh of relief for all the Canadian snail mailers - Canada Post is fully operational as of today. Hooray!

My heart goes out to the Canadians

Canada Post is on strike. I don't know the details of how the rotating strike is working day-by-day, but my impression is that the entire country is pretty much without mail service right now: no pick-up, no delivery. I've heard that postal workers in the USA aren't even accepting packages for mail to Canada right now. (My thanks to 100 days of snail mail for the most recent update.)

I gather there is legislation brewing to address the striking postal workers - I don't know the politics of the situation, but given my sympathy with postal workers, I really don't want to be quick to place blame on anyone - and I sincerely hope our Canadian friends will get their full mail service restored soon!

Another UK postal strike, this one national

My fellow fountain-pen fanatics at The Fountain Pen Network do keep me informed. I've learned that there is to be yet another UK postal strike tomorrow and Friday - but this one is to be national. I've seen statistics that 120,000 of 140,000 UK postal workers will be striking those days, and the FPN folks seem to think that will grind postal service to a halt.

Here's the info from the Royal Mail website.

I don't know the postal workers' reasons for striking, but I imagine they're pretty good. I sympathize with all my UK correspondents and readers for the disruption of their mail - please share your experiences in comments, is it bad? worse than you thought? not a problem? - but I also sympathize with postal workers, who tend to be under-appreciated in this country. Maybe that's not the case in the UK, I don't know - UK readers, I'd love to hear from you about this.

You may wonder why I give so much attention to the UK: quite honestly, I have a lot of correspondents and blog readers in that fine country, and I am generally just blown away by the excellent mail service. Maybe the grass is greener on the other side, but I regularly receive letters and postcards 2-3 days faster from the UK than from the midwestern US, and 1-2 days faster from the US west coast. (I keep track of the postmarks and arrival dates in my little letter log - yeah, I'm that OCD about it!)

Oh well... it's snail mail, and one always hopes it will arrive eventually. I guess the waiting is part of the charm... oui?

UK postal workers strike?

To my friends "across the pond" in the UK:

Perhaps I live under a rock (well, I don't have a TV) but I've only just learned, through reading a postal-related blog, that postal workers in the UK are having strikes all over the place that are affecting mail delivery. My sympathies! What a predicament. I am reading up on the whole backstory now.

I do hope folks in the UK have not experienced significant delays or difficulties, though it seems inevitable...